Introducción: Camagüey ocupa el cuarto lugar nacional en cuanto al número de infectados con VIH/SIDA, después de La Habana, Santiago de Cuba y Holguín. Camagüey se encuentra dentro de los 45 municipios con mayor prevalencia en Cuba. Objetivo: identificar las actitudes socioculturales frente a las infecciones de transmisión sexual en estudiantes de primer año de Medicina. Método: en noviembre de 2011 se realizó un estudio analítico, de corte transversal, a una muestra de estudiantes de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas "Carlos (...) J. Finlay". Se utilizó una encuesta para recoger información. Con el método no paramétrico de Kruskal Wallis se determinó el nivel de conocimiento de los mismos en cada uno de los componentes relacionados con las actitudes socioculturales. Se utilizó la técnica no paramétrica de ji cuadrado para evaluar si existían diferencias significativas entre los distintos grupos de edades, el sexo y el estado civil. Resultados: se valoró que el componente conductual se encuentra fortalecido, entre otras actitudes, por la tendencia de los estudiantes a mantener parejas estables. En el componente cognitivo sólo un 46 % supo reconocer las vías de transmisión del VIH/SIDA, y un 13,2 % no identificó las manifestaciones clínicas relacionadas con las infecciones de transmisión sexual. En el componente afectivo se destacó un 12 % de los encuestados como grupo de riesgo a los que no les gusta usar el preservativo. Conclusiones: como resultado de la encuesta se lograron identificar algunas actitudes socioculturales frente a las infecciones de transmisión sexual en estudiantes de Medicina de primer año, en los componentes valorados. Background: Camagüey has the fourth national place in the number of persons infected with VHI/AIDS, after Havana, Santiago and Holguín. Objetive: the aim of this work is identifying socio-cultural attitudes to face of the infections of sexual transmission in first year Medicine students. Methods: in November 2011, a group of students participated in a questionnaire. The non-parametric test Kruskal Wallis was made to find significant differences in the answers given by persons with different age, sex or civil status, Frequency of answers to each question was found out. The non parametric technique of Ji square was used to evaluate if there were significant differences among the different groups of ages, the sex and the civil status. Results: it was valued that the behavioral component is strengthened, among other attitudes, for the tendency of the students to maintain stable couples, only a 46 % know most of transmission ways of STD and a 13,2 % know the clinical symptoms, a 12 % said they did not like condom use. Conclusions: it was possible to find with this survey some socio-cultural attitudes to face of the infections of sexual transmission in first year Medicine students. (shrink)

José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses--ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has (...) the meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in tourism and leisure interdiscursive domains as displayed in course books on professional communication in English (commonly pointing to ESP). These supposedly replicate interaction in real life settings. Therefore, it is relevant to uncover the ways authentic interactions can be interpreted in the pedagogical setting of workplace conversation from a discursive and pragmatic perspective. More specifically, this empirical and exploratory study discusses ways of improving rapport (...) management skills in interpersonal and intercultural communication, in general, and in professional interaction, in particular, in a selection of excerpts on greeting / asking for info exchanges. The study uncovers participants’ possible co-constructions of civility and politeness strategies in naturally occurring classroom discourse supported by course materials in English for glocal communication across segments in the tourism domain as object of this study. (shrink)

This paper is meant to discuss two diverse but mutually entailed goals, underpinning the analysis of media business discourse. On the one hand, it promotes a critical understanding of how gender marks discourse and encodes power in business discursive communities, thus playing a key role in “shaping the expectations about people’s behaviours”. On the other, it promotes an interdisciplinary approach so as to disambiguate the discursive and argumentative strategies in the construction of media content by focusing on the symbolic organization (...) and interaction between citizens and the discursive communities, in terms of male/female representations, given the way they throw global challenges and/or replicate stereotypes and particular ways of perceiving the business discourse in terms of enunciation. The contrastive analysis of a corpus of magazine texts, covering news in April and May 2011, with a large readership in the global scenario, in Portuguese and in English, uncovers the power imbalance created when media texts pass on stereotypical patterns of behaviour in business and everyday discursive communities. (shrink)

The subject matter of this paper is the view that it is correct, in an absolute sense, to believe a proposition just in case the proposition is true. I take issue with arguments in support of this view put forward by Nishi Shah and David Velleman.

To the sceptic's contention that I don't know that I have hands because I don't know that there is an external world, the Moorean replies that I know that there is an external world because I know that I have hands. Crispin Wright has argued that the Moorean move is illegitimate, and has tried to block it by limiting the applicability of the principle of the transmission of knowledge by inference—the principle that recognising the validity of an inference from known (...) premises generates knowledge of the conclusion. I argue that, in the presence of some plausible assumptions, blocking the Moorean move does not require limiting the applicability of the transmission principle. Then I argue against Jim Pryor's contention that the Moorean argument transmits evidential support from its premises to its conclusion. (shrink)

Reliabilist accounts of knowledge are widely seen as having the resources for blocking sceptical arguments, since these arguments appear to rely on assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are rendered illegitimate by reliabilist accounts. The goal of this book is to assess the main arguments against the possibility of knowledge, and its conclusions challenge this consensus. The book articulates and defends a theory of knowledge that belongs firmly in the truth-tracking tradition, and argues that although the theory has the (...) resources for blocking the main standard lines of sceptical reasoning, there is a sceptical argument against which the theory offers no defence, as it doesn’t rely on any assumptions that the theory would render illegitimate. The book ends with the suggestion that the problem might have a metaphysical solution—that although the sceptical argument may make no illegitimate epistemological assumptions, it does rest on a questionable account of the nature of cognition. (shrink)

En este artículo se trata de explicar en qué sentido la división sexual del trabajo está originalmente articulada por un conjunto de artefactos técnicos que la determinan y definen. Concretamente, el papel de los artefactos consiste en activar la normatividad de género. Cómo estos activen la norma depende del modo en que la norma interpela a los agentes. Somos evaluables bajo las normas de género por la posición social que ocupamos, según el adscriptivismo, o porque respaldamos subjetivamente la norma, según (...) el voluntarismo. Ambas posiciones tienen parte de razón y pueden ser integradas en una definición disposicional del género, según la cual se puede afirmar que somos sensibles bajo las normas de género en virtud del modo en que habitamos, subjetivamente, la posición social. La relación entre la normatividad de género y los artefactos puede definirse entonces como una activación, por parte de estos, de las disposiciones generizadas. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book-length work to have been published during his lifetime, continues to generate interest and scholarly debate. This volume of new essays showcases contemporary ideas on how to interpret the Tractatus and throws new light on some of its most challenging passages.

This volume comprises nine lively and insightful essays by leading scholars on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing mainly on his early work.

Social suffering commands increasing public attention in the wake of several historical processes that have changed the ways victims are perceived. In making suffering eloquent by rendering it in conceptual form, philosophy runs the risk of muting suffering, thereby neutralizing its ability to mobilize responses. In the experience of suffering philosophy finds a limit it must recognize as its own. Yet only by fulfilling its duty towards suffering - only by having the abolition of suffering as its ultimate goal - (...) can philosophical thinking withstand a tacit complicity with injustice. (shrink)

This paper is a research study of an interdisciplinary and exploratory kind drawing on a case study undertaken in elementary classrooms in socio-economically disadvantaged areas of Santiago de Chile. Having combined Linguistics for Education Studies and Corpus Linguistics approaches, the analysis of pragmalinguistic choices (i.e. personal pronouns, other lexical choices marking in-group relations) used in the introductory parts in a corpus of 50 lessons recorded in an elementary school setting there comes to be a key strategy for teachers' and learners' (...) involvement in classroom interaction The pragmalinguistic strategies evidenced in teachers' and learners' output have come to confirm the role of communicative strategies to promote participants' engagement in the teaching/learning process. In other words, teachers create an in-group relation, a solid sense of belonging and empathy among the participants in the teaching-learning context from the opening communicative stances in use to overcome less advantaged home and community cultural settings. The research findings also point to further studies to devise pedagogic tools addressing the specific contexts under scrutiny. Thus, a Teacher-Learner rapport is conveyed primarily through teachers' language choice, which is seen as the main force for learners' engagement in disadvantaged settings. (shrink)

This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness - within broader politeness orientations - of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish vis-à-vis (...) indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the role of (in)formality and (in)directness in email messages sent by members of two groups of undergraduate students to their university lecturers. To this end, a corpus of 100 impromptu emails was compiled and analysed. Results revealed complex, fluctuating patterns regarding levels of (in)formality and (in)directness that underlined cross-cultural variation in the way that different sociopragmatic principles found expression in a specific computer-mediated communicative situation. (shrink)

Background The Regional Committee for Africa of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2001 expressed concern that some health-related studies undertaken in the Region were not subjected to any form of ethics review. In 2003, the study reported in this paper was conducted to determine which Member country did not have a national research ethics committee (REC) with a view to guiding the WHO Regional Office in developing practical strategies for supporting those countries. Methods This is a descriptive study. The (...) questionnaire was prepared and sent by diplomatic pouch to all the 46 Member States in the WHO African Region, through the WHO country representatives, for facilitation and follow up. The data were entered in Excel spreadsheet and subsequently exported to STATA for analysis. A Chi-Squared test (χ 2) for independence was undertaken to test the relationship between presence/absence of Research Ethics Committee (REC) and selected individual socioeconomic and health variables. Results The main findings were as follows: the response rate was 61% (28/46); 64% (18/28) confirmed the existence of RECs; 36% (10/28) of the respondent countries did not have a REC (although 80% of them reported that they had in place an ad hoc ethical review mechanism); 85% (22/26) of the countries that responded to this question indicated that ethical approval of research proposals was, in principle, required; and although 59% of the countries that had a REC expected it to meet every month, only 44% of them reported that the REC actually met on a monthly basis. In the Chi-Squared test, only the average population in the group of countries with a REC was statistically different (at 5% level of significance) from that of the group of countries without a REC. Conclusion In the current era of globalized biomedical research, good ethics stewardship demands that every country, irrespective of its level of economic development, should have in place a functional research ethics review system in order to protect the dignity, integrity and safety of its citizens who participate in research. (shrink)

Many interpreters of the Tractatus accept that the book endorses an argument for simples based on the reflection that, since complexes exist only contingently, if names referred to complexes the propositions in which they figure would lack sense if their referents went out of existence. More specifically, most interpreters read 2.0211-2.0212 as putting forward this argument. My main goal in this paper is to attack this reading and to put forward an alternative. I argue that there is no good reason (...) for thinking that the Tractatus advances this argument. I argue that 2.0211-2, in particular, should not be read in this way, and put forward an alternative reading of the passage. (shrink)

In the era of information and communication, issues of misinformation and miscommunication are more pressing than ever. _Epistemic injustice - _one of the most important and ground-breaking subjects to have emerged in philosophy in recent years - refers to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. The first collection (...) of its kind, it comprises over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, divided into five parts: Core Concepts Liberatory Epistemologies and Axes of Oppression Schools of Thought and Subfields within Epistemology Socio-political, Ethical, and Psychological Dimensions of Knowing Case Studies of Epistemic Injustice. As well as fundamental topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and epistemic trust, the Handbook includes chapters on important issues such as social and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, and gender and race. Also included are chapters on areas in applied ethics and philosophy, such as law, education, and healthcare. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice is essential reading for students and researchers in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. It will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, sociology, education and law. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke rejects some of the most popular accounts of what meaning facts consist in on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the normative character of meaning. I argue that a widespread interpretation of Kripke's argument is incorrect. I contend that the argument does not rest on the contrast between descriptive and normative facts, but on the thought that speakers' uses of linguistic expressions have to be justified. I suggest that the line (...) of reasoning that I attribute to Kripke can be seen as putting pressure on the idea that predicate satisfaction is to be explained in terms of a relation between predicates and properties. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyze investor behavior towards socially responsible mutual funds. The analysis is based on an experimental study where a sample of individuals takes investment decisions under different parameters of information about the investment alternatives and expected returns. In the experiment, each participant decides how to distribute an investment budget between two funds, returns on which are uncertain and change over time. Two treatments are conducted, each providing a different degree of information on the socially (...) responsible (SR) character of one of the two investment alternatives. The results obtained suggest that although individuals’ criteria for investment are essentially guided by returns and diversification, participants invest significantly more in a fund when they are explicitly informed about its SR nature. In particular, participants who declare being concerned about SR actually invest significantly more in the SR alternative. Furthermore, the level of SR faithfulness among a small group of investors is such that they invest the main share of their budget in the SR fund, even when the return differential is highly unfavorable. Providing clear information about the SR characteristics of an investment is crucial to help investors express their preferences. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

The paper argues against Sosa’s claim that sensitivity cannot be differentially supported over safety as the right requirement for knowledge. Its main contention is that, although all sensitive beliefs that should be counted as knowledge are also safe, some insensitive true beliefs that shouldn’t be counted as knowledge are nevertheless safe.

Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others’ compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at curbing (...) free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation. (shrink)

In the recent literature on confirmation there are two leading approaches to the provision of a probabilistic measure of the degree to which a hypothesis is confirmed by evidence. The first is to construe the degree to which evidence E confirms hypothesis H as a function that is directly proportional to p and inversely proportional to p . I shall refer to this as the probability approach. The second approach construes the notion as a function that is directly proportional to (...) the true-positive rate – the probability of the evidence if the hypothesis is true, p – and inversely proportional to the false-positive rate – the probability of the evidence if the hypothesis is false, p . These reverse conditional probabilities – of the evidence on the truth or falsehood of the hypothesis – are sometimes known as likelihoods. I shall refer to the approach to confirmation that uses them as the likelihood approach.For each of these approaches, there are two obvious options as to how to define the confirmation function. The first is to define it as the difference between the magnitude that is treated as increasing confirmation or p ) and the magnitude that is treated as decreasing confirmation or p ). The second is to define confirmation as the quotient of these two magnitudes.This yields four different measures of confirmation, represented in the following table: Differences RatiosProbabilities PD = p – p1 PR = Graphic2Likelihoods LD = p – p3 LR = Graphic4All these measures agree on whether or not E provides some support for H. Intuitively, we want to say that E provides some support for H just in case learning that E is true would make us assign a higher probability to H, i.e. when p(H …. (shrink)

The paper deals with a version of the principle that a belief source can be a knowledge source only if the subject knows that it is reliable. I argue that the principle can be saved from the main objections that motivate its widespread rejection: the claim that it leads to skepticism, the claim that it forces us to accept counterintuitive knowledge ascriptions and the claim that it is incompatible with reliabilist accounts of knowledge. I argue that naturalist epistemologists should reject (...) these claims. I introduce my treatment of the principle by considering the analogous situation posed by the closure principle. (shrink)

Estudo introdutório de apresentação, seguido de tradução, da palestra “Fenomenologia e antropologia”, ministradas por Edmund Husserl nas sedes da Kantgesellschaft de Frankfurt, Berlim e Halle em 1931, na qual avalia criticamente, a partir dos pressupostos transcendentais da fenomenologia, a tendência da filosofia alemã dos anos 20 do século passado para uma antropologia filosófica.

Editorial do dossiê Técnica, tecnologia e educação em Heidegger e Simondon.

This essay explores the contact between the Italian and Argentine cultures during the period of mass immigration by pointing out and commenting on a series of translations and artistic creations made by Italian artists in Buenos Aires: musical, literary, theatrical and pictorial works. In order to understand how the semiotic frontier was composed, we approached the question from a methodology that arises at the intersection of the phenomenon of translation and the semiotic theory of cultural interaction. Thinking about translation in (...) this way highlights its sociological dimension given the links that the source-text establishes with the programs of certain trends in the organization of a culture. The methodology consists on the description of the semiotic frontier showing which texts are of interest to whom and for what. In this way, we seek to understand how a certain tendency was positioned in relation to the project of sustaining italianità in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th Century. The path proposed shows the frontier between the Italian and Argentine cultures as a bilingual mechanism of mediation from which a cultural group of immigrants developed actions to propose the textual and metatextual guidelines of c. (shrink)

El análisis que se desarrolla en este artículo, está dirigido a desconstruir el modelo de episteme de la racionalidadmoderna, que tiene por pretensión la reconstrucción objetiva de la realidad y su validez universal y absoluta para cualquier contexto cognitivo. Se propone una alternativa a este tipo..

I argue that Epistemic Disjunctivism doesn’t sustain a successful anti-sceptical strategy. I contend, in particular, that the treatment of scepticism that Duncan Pritchard puts forward on behalf of Epistemic Disjunctivism is unsatisfactory.